Energy efficiency is a concern in operating and managing computing services. Energy consumption can affect the operational costs for the computing services and can contribute to the environmental impact of computing services. Power-aware service management solutions require access to power consumption data at the service level The power consumption of a computing service can be a useful tool in devising methods to improve energy efficiency for a computing service.
Deriving power consumption data for computing services can be a challenging task. Computing services, such as customer relationship management and electronic commerce services, can be complex and include many service components running across multiple physical servers. Service components from different services can be co-located on a node and share resources on the node. In particular, virtual server environments can include configurations where components and resources for a computing service are shared among one or more physical servers. Therefore, directly measuring power consumption for a computing service at a service level can be difficult and many times can be impossible.
In some previous approaches, power models have be used to estimate power consumption. The power consumption estimates can use resource usage in the power models, but these estimations can be difficult because resources can be shared by multiple computing services. Some previous approaches have used physical system level power data to estimate power consumption, but these estimates can not be used to determine power consumption at the service level because physical system level power data does not include enough granularity to determine the individual services that contribute the power consumption of the system.